A deceptively simple tale enriched by Gates’s equally sharp take on contemporary Mormon culture, down-and-dirty politics,...
Things have settled down so much for alcoholic lawyer Brigham Bybee since Brigham’s Day (2000) that he’s purchased an isolated motel that keeps him close to his ladylove, Zolene Swapp, while the job he’s been hired to do as Utah’s Special Assistant Attorney General—prosecute notorious polygamist T. Rampton Crowe, self-styled Father of the Faithful ensconced in nearby New Ammon—rumbles on toward a trial that will feature star witness Roma Ann McCallister, a.k.a. Crowe’s wife Faith, who ran away from New Ammon and is being hidden by the state from Crowe’s fearsome Blood Disciples. But Bybee’s peace is shattered when another of Crowe’s wives—the seductive Mercy, née Chenoya Whiting—turns up at his motel beaten, begging for shelter, and telling a wild story of how Crowe and the disciples gelded and beheaded Franklin Pugh, the man she was taken with in adultery. Now Cynthia Hassert, the embattled attorney general, and Tom Kendall, Bybee’s boss in the office of Special Prosecutions, see a chance to convict Crowe of aggravated murder. But the pitched political fight between the prosecutors who want to put their names on the map by executing Crowe, and the politicos determined to burnish the state’s image by prosecuting Crowe for polygamy and nothing more, is bound to have casualties like Bybee—that is, if Crowe’s minions don’t get him first.
A deceptively simple tale enriched by Gates’s equally sharp take on contemporary Mormon culture, down-and-dirty politics, and the eternally running battle between legal justice and the other kind.Pub Date: July 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-3363-8
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
